The interior of the Church was partitioned off and the subdivisions appropriated, not only by various preachers of the new religion for their own special services, but also by the laity for various secular purposes. A court of justice was held in one, a grammar school in another, the town clerk’s office in a third, a prison in a fourth, and so on; and the Town Council found one of the ancient chapels a suitable place in which to erect looms to test the exhibits of city weavers accused of peculations. Any great religious upheaval produces, on the part of the rude and vulgar, these manifestations of irreverence toward the old order of things; and too much importance must not be attached to them. Darnley, three weeks after his marriage to Queen Mary, attended service at St. Giles’s, but Knox preached “an hour or more longer than the time appointed” on the wickedness of princes, and how “boys and women” are set up as rulers and tyrants; and young Darnley was “crabbit” afterwards, spent the afternoon in hawking, and never came to St. Giles’s again. After Queen Mary’s flight to England, Edinburgh was in a state of civil war; and Kirkaldy of Grange, who held the Castle for the Queen for three years, garrisoned St. Giles’s as a fort, hoisted cannon and soldiers up into the steeple, and loopholed the gables for arquebuses, and John Knox once again fled for his life. Until 1585 Edinburgh citizens had contentedly, and perhaps with sufficient punctuality, regulated their doings by the bells of St. Giles’s; but in that year the Town Council bought, for the sum of fifty-five pounds Scots, a clock from the Abbey Church of Lindores, and hung it up in the steeple. Stormy hours were the hands of that clock from the quiet Fifeshire Abbey destined to mark! In King James VI.’s reign, stirring events happened in the Church of St. Giles. The King often used the Church for conferences, which sometimes ended in disputes between the King and representatives of early Presbyterian zeal, not conducted with due regard to kingly dignity on either side. In 1596 it was the scene of a difference of opinion of this nature, and James had to take refuge from it in the adjacent Tolbooth, and thence, when the Tolbooth was attacked by an armed mob, to hurry home to Holyrood. It was after this incident that the King, instead of carrying out his original intention of razing Edinburgh to the ground and salting its site, contented himself with ordering the four ministers of St. Giles’s to live in different and distant parts of the town, instead of all four together in “ain clois,” hatching treason at their ease.